Useful Tools

Over the years I have collected and used a number of tools for software development, most of them free, so if you really want to play around with the EQ2 XML stuff then don't use notepad, it is pretty much useless and you can get much better for free.




For editing XML directly and other general files, a very useful a free tool is the Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2013 for Web. It can take a while getting used to and is superb for making .NET web pages and sites with all of the new fangled page widgets etc. but that is too deep to go into here. I am recommending it to simply use to view and exit the EQ2 XML files rather than notepad.

Windows notepad.... Ugh

Using notepad can be quite a strain on the eyes and as the xml lines are so long it can be quite hard picking stuff out that you may need to tweak manually.


Notepad++ is available and this has some syntax highlighting capability. As with Visual Studio it can be quite a steep learning curve to get to know from scratch, but both notepad++ and Visual Studio can display the xml and allow you to edit without having to learn the editors.




Below is a dump of one of the xml files using Visual Studio 2013. It is much easier on the eye and the various tags and element colours can be configured easily. The default colour scheme is not too shabby though.

Visual Studio 2013 for Web Development and great for editing XML files.

Visual Studio 2013 can be downloaded from http://www.asp.net/vwd


Notepad++ can be downloaded from http://notepad-plus-plus.org/




You may also like to look at the UI Builder tool that the developers have used to create all of the interfaces. I wont be uploading anything about using this tool until I have discovered more about it, but a word document does exist within the download that contains some useful information. The UI Builder can be downloaded from http://www.eq2interface.com/downloads/info3418-UIBuilder.html